Hands of my Islam, Mr Blair
The Muslim Anarchist | 19.07.2005 18:10 | Analysis | Anti-racism | Free Spaces
Muslims condemn violence against innocents, which is why so many of us feel as much anger towards Blair as we do towards the London bombers. And the trail of blood on both counts leads back to 10 Downing Street.
Tony Blair rarely invites genuine debate about his policies. He is what is known in the business of State control as a ‘conviction’ politician. A typical postmodern political operator. Just like his corporate buddies, Blair is not so much in the business of selling you policies, as selling you to the brand – President Blair PLC. There may be ‘public consultation’ on some matters, but how often is this little more than a PR stunt, a feigned act of democracy, an invitation to tinker with administrative detail while the ideological core of the idea remains beyond critique? Not that Tony is simply a liar. Boss Blair is at his best as arch-manipulator, appealing to beliefs, ideas and attitudes at the point where self and culture are closely intertwined – national solidarity, pragmatic morality and even the affable managerialism which he so claims to be his style.
Blair’s conviction politics is clearly evident in his most recent assertion, to work with Muslim communities to uproot "perverted and poisonous misrepresentations" of Islam. Here Blair is appealing to the British cultural trope of compromise and moderation, made heady by nationalistic appeals to solidarity. After all, in this climate, who could disagree with the idea of fighting extremists who espouse violence? Yet seen from outside the illusions of Blairspeak and patriotic fervour, one cannot deny that Blair’s pronouncements deflect blame from his role in fermenting the cycle of terror and counter-terror. Here is a man whose hands drip with the blood of countless thousands of innocent Iraqis. The reality is Tony Blair is as much an violent extremist, as much an absolutist, as any global Jihadi.
Blair’s intention, along with his neoconservative friends in the White House, is to sell the world to corporate consumer greed. He sells our schools and hospitals to private contractors, or should I say he sells us privately financed public services to in the name of ‘consumer choice’. He wants to sell us GM crops, which benefit only bloated corporations, who care nothing for human health and the environment. In short, Blair champions the PLC, the institution that cares nothing for lives destroyed in the name of profit, even if it means having their friends in the Whitehouse (helped by its poodles) bomb the opposition into submission.
Like his corporate buddies, Blair’s hypocrisy knows no bounds. His government tightens laws on gun ownership in Britain, whilst the UK remains the second biggest manufacturer and exporter of arms in the world. And when his arguments don’t fit ‘the facts’, Blair simply changes the facts. We invaded Iraq because of the threat of weapons of mass destruction; sorry, I mean the threat of WMD programmes; no, I mean we went to war to depose that evil tyrant Saddam Hussein. The man has the gall of a Klingon!
His latest sales tool is nationalism, appealing to the deep sense of shock which all people living in Britain have experienced in the wake of the London bombings. Honing this latest weapon, Blair now calls on Muslims and non-Muslims alike, as “British people”, to condemn the London atrocities, whilst his minions deny any links between these terrible acts and British foreign policy. At the same time, he wants Imams working in the UK to speak English and understand civic life, as if somehow speaking Urdu or not knowing how to claim social security makes you a potential threat to national security.
In Blair’s new world, post 7/7, there can be no divided loyalties, as if our first loyalty should be to ‘nation’ rather than to justice, reason and even God. This is a debased nationalism. Like the colonial leaders and political absolutists of old, what Blair wants more than anything is docile subjects. And just like the crooks that once ravaged Muslim lands, Blair knows that the communities that call themselves ‘Muslim’, just like the ‘British’, are not real communities, based on daily social contact, but imagined communities where ideas play a crucial role in identity formation. King-of-spin Blair is on familiar ground, of course, and he sincerely and passionately believes he can influence Muslims in Britain and elsewhere to support his ideas on ‘moderation’.
The fact is, we’ve heard it all before. Over the pond in the USA, the report of the Rand Corporation extolled a similar vision of Muslim moderation, and no doubt for similar reasons. The “moderate” vision of Islam postulated in this ill-informed document is a political conformist, a perfect Western consumer and docile citizen. Muslims who want the US military out of the Middle East, at gun point if necessary, and Muslims who oppose globalising corporate capitalism and its cultural accoutrements as fundamentally immoral – they are the Islamic extremists. Anything that even smells of Rand will get short shrift from the overwhelming majority of British Muslims, have no doubt of that.
Muslims condemn violence against innocents, which is why so many of us feel as much anger towards Blair as we do towards the London bombers. Indeed, the trail of blood on both counts leads back to 10 Downing Street, second home to Britain’s corporate and largely Islamophobic media. After 9/11, the fishing expeditions and press-pack panics surrounding extremists didn’t so much marginalise lunatics like Abu Hamza – in fact, they probably gave him a degree of credibility that comes with notoriety. Instead, outside the media gaze, a tiny minority of passionate and newly politicised Muslim youth were censored. And when people can’t talk openly about ideas, particular when these people are young and impressionable, they fester in secret places. The truth is, you cannot sanction or marginalise people who are prepared to take their own lives at the same time as others. The best defence against the rubbish thinking of global jihadis is talk, and that's not some woolly liberal view, but an idea already put into practice by hard-headed Muslim scholars.
In Yemen, Muslims leaders directly challenged extremists and defeated their ideas using nothing more than reasoned debate. Instead of rooting out and clamping down, they took known extremists, sat them down and changed their minds in open discussion. "The pen and the tongue that God has granted you can achieve more than all the weapons in the world,” proclaimed Judge Hamoud Al-Hitar, a truth Blair routinely exploits to his political advantage. Yet no Yemeni scholar telephoned Tony Blair to buffer his arguments - a truly God-fearing Muslim does not tell lies. None took special courses in English before instigating the debate. And they didn’t pledge allegiance to anything or anyone in this world- only Almighty Allah.
The mistake now would be for British Muslim leaders to be seen walking hand in glove with Blair in the management of post-7/7 Muslim communities. The consequences could well prove to be extremely divisive, even disastrous. British Muslim youth, already politicised and made street-wise by events post-9/11, may well view such a compromise as a betrayal. It is enough that our leaders already sit up and beg as killer Blair showers them with Lordships and knighthoods – it is sad Iqbal Sacranie didn’t take a leaf out of Benjamin Zephaniah’s book, and send his knighthood back. This is a tough time for Muslims in Britain, but let not the fear of reprisals or a false sense of shame drive us into hasty and divisive alignments. Help the police catch criminals, by all and every means, but we alone can and should sort out our own religious affairs without having to drop a knee to Tony and his puppet masters in Washington and the Stock Exchange.
Blair’s conviction politics is clearly evident in his most recent assertion, to work with Muslim communities to uproot "perverted and poisonous misrepresentations" of Islam. Here Blair is appealing to the British cultural trope of compromise and moderation, made heady by nationalistic appeals to solidarity. After all, in this climate, who could disagree with the idea of fighting extremists who espouse violence? Yet seen from outside the illusions of Blairspeak and patriotic fervour, one cannot deny that Blair’s pronouncements deflect blame from his role in fermenting the cycle of terror and counter-terror. Here is a man whose hands drip with the blood of countless thousands of innocent Iraqis. The reality is Tony Blair is as much an violent extremist, as much an absolutist, as any global Jihadi.
Blair’s intention, along with his neoconservative friends in the White House, is to sell the world to corporate consumer greed. He sells our schools and hospitals to private contractors, or should I say he sells us privately financed public services to in the name of ‘consumer choice’. He wants to sell us GM crops, which benefit only bloated corporations, who care nothing for human health and the environment. In short, Blair champions the PLC, the institution that cares nothing for lives destroyed in the name of profit, even if it means having their friends in the Whitehouse (helped by its poodles) bomb the opposition into submission.
Like his corporate buddies, Blair’s hypocrisy knows no bounds. His government tightens laws on gun ownership in Britain, whilst the UK remains the second biggest manufacturer and exporter of arms in the world. And when his arguments don’t fit ‘the facts’, Blair simply changes the facts. We invaded Iraq because of the threat of weapons of mass destruction; sorry, I mean the threat of WMD programmes; no, I mean we went to war to depose that evil tyrant Saddam Hussein. The man has the gall of a Klingon!
His latest sales tool is nationalism, appealing to the deep sense of shock which all people living in Britain have experienced in the wake of the London bombings. Honing this latest weapon, Blair now calls on Muslims and non-Muslims alike, as “British people”, to condemn the London atrocities, whilst his minions deny any links between these terrible acts and British foreign policy. At the same time, he wants Imams working in the UK to speak English and understand civic life, as if somehow speaking Urdu or not knowing how to claim social security makes you a potential threat to national security.
In Blair’s new world, post 7/7, there can be no divided loyalties, as if our first loyalty should be to ‘nation’ rather than to justice, reason and even God. This is a debased nationalism. Like the colonial leaders and political absolutists of old, what Blair wants more than anything is docile subjects. And just like the crooks that once ravaged Muslim lands, Blair knows that the communities that call themselves ‘Muslim’, just like the ‘British’, are not real communities, based on daily social contact, but imagined communities where ideas play a crucial role in identity formation. King-of-spin Blair is on familiar ground, of course, and he sincerely and passionately believes he can influence Muslims in Britain and elsewhere to support his ideas on ‘moderation’.
The fact is, we’ve heard it all before. Over the pond in the USA, the report of the Rand Corporation extolled a similar vision of Muslim moderation, and no doubt for similar reasons. The “moderate” vision of Islam postulated in this ill-informed document is a political conformist, a perfect Western consumer and docile citizen. Muslims who want the US military out of the Middle East, at gun point if necessary, and Muslims who oppose globalising corporate capitalism and its cultural accoutrements as fundamentally immoral – they are the Islamic extremists. Anything that even smells of Rand will get short shrift from the overwhelming majority of British Muslims, have no doubt of that.
Muslims condemn violence against innocents, which is why so many of us feel as much anger towards Blair as we do towards the London bombers. Indeed, the trail of blood on both counts leads back to 10 Downing Street, second home to Britain’s corporate and largely Islamophobic media. After 9/11, the fishing expeditions and press-pack panics surrounding extremists didn’t so much marginalise lunatics like Abu Hamza – in fact, they probably gave him a degree of credibility that comes with notoriety. Instead, outside the media gaze, a tiny minority of passionate and newly politicised Muslim youth were censored. And when people can’t talk openly about ideas, particular when these people are young and impressionable, they fester in secret places. The truth is, you cannot sanction or marginalise people who are prepared to take their own lives at the same time as others. The best defence against the rubbish thinking of global jihadis is talk, and that's not some woolly liberal view, but an idea already put into practice by hard-headed Muslim scholars.
In Yemen, Muslims leaders directly challenged extremists and defeated their ideas using nothing more than reasoned debate. Instead of rooting out and clamping down, they took known extremists, sat them down and changed their minds in open discussion. "The pen and the tongue that God has granted you can achieve more than all the weapons in the world,” proclaimed Judge Hamoud Al-Hitar, a truth Blair routinely exploits to his political advantage. Yet no Yemeni scholar telephoned Tony Blair to buffer his arguments - a truly God-fearing Muslim does not tell lies. None took special courses in English before instigating the debate. And they didn’t pledge allegiance to anything or anyone in this world- only Almighty Allah.
The mistake now would be for British Muslim leaders to be seen walking hand in glove with Blair in the management of post-7/7 Muslim communities. The consequences could well prove to be extremely divisive, even disastrous. British Muslim youth, already politicised and made street-wise by events post-9/11, may well view such a compromise as a betrayal. It is enough that our leaders already sit up and beg as killer Blair showers them with Lordships and knighthoods – it is sad Iqbal Sacranie didn’t take a leaf out of Benjamin Zephaniah’s book, and send his knighthood back. This is a tough time for Muslims in Britain, but let not the fear of reprisals or a false sense of shame drive us into hasty and divisive alignments. Help the police catch criminals, by all and every means, but we alone can and should sort out our own religious affairs without having to drop a knee to Tony and his puppet masters in Washington and the Stock Exchange.
The Muslim Anarchist
e-mail:
plimfix@btopenworld.com
Homepage:
http://www.bayyinat.org.uk/index.html
Comments
Hide the following comment
nice one
20.07.2005 13:40
how true
one might care to consider
Tube Lines
one half of a duo of operators for the London Underground
is a joint venture between specialist public services provider Amey
and U.S. private industrial firm Bechtel ...
That's Bechtel: Currently Profiting from Destruction in Afghanistan & Iraq...
The company Van by the destroyed bus at Tavistock Square
[see bottom of this page]
------------------------------------------
= Kingstar -
contracts with Balfour Beatty
------------------------------------------
who just got let off a corporate manslaughter charge
Metronet's the other tube operator
shareholders consist of five world-class companies: Atkins, Balfour
Beatty, Bombardier, EDF Energy, and RWE Thames Water. Metronet's business has
a staff of some 5,000 people.
what do Kingstar do?
Controlled Demolition & Robotic Demolition
although on the website of Kingstar
their demolition methods do not seem to include explosives...
but diamond tipped drilling and robotic dismantling,
two questions
who makes the robots?
where they get the diamonds...?
---------------------------------------------------------
Yet another 'co-incidence' is that Aegis defense - corporate security service,
are run by Tim Spicer, who has been involved in spurious activity in Africa,
the sponsoring of an aborted coup in the West African nation of Equatorial
Guinea, which has the aim of plundering Natural resources such as oil
reserves & Gold, diamond mining...
Strangely... they also offered intelligence analysis to the Pentagon over the
explosives used in the London Bombings
---------------------------------------------------------
Aegis London Bomb intell
---------------------------------------------------------
"According to a confidential report produced the day after the bombing by a
private London security firm, Aegis Defense Services, Ltd., which was seen
and read by Pentagon officials, the team was probably four to six
strong . . . The Aegis report says it is possible that the explosives were
'constructed by an experienced bomb maker, possibly coming to the U.K. for
that very purpose.'" -Rush Hour By Michael Elliott
---------------------------------------------------------
Iraq contract
---------------------------------------------------------
"Occupation authorities in Iraq have awarded a $293 million contract
effectively creating the world's largest private army to a company headed by
Lieutenant Colonel Tim Spicer, a former officer with the Scots Guard, an
elite regiment of the British military, who has been investigated for
illegally smuggling arms and planning military offensives to support mining,
oil, and gas operations around the world. On May 25, the Army Transportation
command awarded Spicer's company, Aegis Defense Services, the contract to
coordinate all the security for Iraqi reconstruction projects."
Controversial Commando Wins Iraq Contract
---------------------------------------------------------
Aegis is 'currently' [not known about recent developments]
being investigated by the Coalition Provisional Authority's Inspector
General.
---------------------------------------------------------
would you trust intelligence offered by
corporate stormtroopers hired to protect the Elites 'Global interests'?
By the Elite I mean ROYALLY apporived corpoate killing on
behalf of the EMPIRE
if you need to cover your ass you would
the same corporate cartel own the media and the intelligence it uses...
[do any of the minions working at these places know?]
---------------------------------------------------------
Tim Spicer's record of sanctions-busting and political embarrassment seemed to
have been forgotten. He had welcomed television appearances since leaving
Sandline. "But only serious comment [shows]," his PR adviser, Pearson said.
Spicer appeared again on a BBC current affairs show in February 2002 to
discuss the green paper on private soldiers, looking pleased and dubbing
himself the "proper end of the spectrum." A week later, speaking on Feb. 19
at the Royal Institute of International Affairs conference at Chatham House,
Spicer told the international audience that he welcomed the government's
proposal to license private military companies.
Britain's Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, whose immediate predecessor, Robin
Cook, had been humiliated by Spicer's conduct, was now toeing the PMC line.
Straw announced "states and international organizations are turning to the
private sector as a cost effective way of procuring services which would once
have been the exclusive preserve of the military."
Straw prophesied that "the demand for private military services is likely to
increase. The cost of employing private military companies for certain
functions in U.N. operations could be much lower than that of national armed
forces." But he added, "clearly there are many pitfalls."
There were pitfalls in such proposals- and the British Foreign Office's green
paper had ignored nearly all of them. The conclusions the foreign secretary
so readily endorsed drew nothing from British diplomatic expertise or private
knowledge of (or involvement with) mercenary companies. Instead, it relied on
such unofficial sources as a recently published book, Mercenaries: an African
Security Dilemma, edited by Abdel-Fatau Musah and J'Kayode Fayemi. The
British government paper also failed to mention that the Foreign Office,
itself, had hired bodyguards for more than 20 years from companies that also
promoted and provided mercenary activities around the world. Nor did it say
that some of these companies had been and were being employed by U.S. and
British intelligence agencies for secret operations in Nicaragua, Afghanistan
and Kosovo- or that the explicit political purpose of doing so was official
deniability. - Duncan Campbell
-----------------------------------------------------
Is this guy Michael W Spicer related to Tim Spicer ????
[anglo American]interests-----defended by [Aegis Defense services]????
-----------------------------------------------------
Spicer Michael W.
Executive Vice-President, Corporate Affairs, Anglo American Corporation of
South Africa, South Africa
Anglo American Corporation of South Africa
Mining house with widespread interests in gold, coal, platinum, base metals,
paper and packaging, industrial minerals and ferrous metals. Has total assets
of some US$ 33,000 million, while its market capitalization for the year 2002
stood at US$ 22,000 million.
Personal Profile:
Studied at St John's College, Johannesburg; MA (Hons), Rhodes University.
1978-80, Research Assistant, Royal Institute of International Affairs,
London. Deputy Director, South African Institute of International Affairs.
Executive Director, Anglo American Corporation; currently, Executive
Vice-President, Corporate Affairs, Anglo American Corporation of South
Africa. Former: Personal Assistant to Gavin Relly; Senior Divisional Public
Affairs Manager, Gold and Uranium Division, Anglo American Corporation.
Member of the Board: National Business Initiative; Business Against Crime.
Council Member: SA Institute of International Affairs; South Africa
Foundation. Chairman, Anglo American Farms.
W.?open
-----------------------------------------------------
from: Umrabulo
Mayibuye, Vol. 6, no. 6, October 1995
"Of course we believe in competition, but..."
Michael Spicer, a senior Anglo American executive and big business ideologue,
has been having an ongoing quarrel with Trevor Manuel. The ANC Minister of
Trade and Industry is developing proposals to break the hold that monopolies
(like Anglo) have over our economy (and over our lives).
Manuel's proposals are quite simple. He wants to introduce greater
competition. Somehow Spicer doesn't like that idea.
It's amusing how big business ideologues have a lot to say about
competition... except when it comes to being competed against.
Recently, Manuel and Spicer shared a conference platform. After Manuel had
outlined his anti-monopoly perspectives, Spicer had a chance to speak. "Thank
heavens," he said rather menacingly, "politicians have short shelf lives."
-----------------------------------------------------
Metronet - Balfour beatty
Tubelines - Bechtel
Aegis-Bechtel-Pentagon
Bechtel [Iraq]
Aegis [Iraq] spicer
Aegis [Africa] Tim Spicer
Anglo-American [M.Spicer]
Mining and Labour
tenous i know but worth investigating
also of course we have barrick Gold in Africa - and Bushlinks
---------------------------------------------------------
Though Barrick struck out in Indonesia and the Congo, the big payoff came from
the other side of the continent. The companys president bragged to
shareholders that the prestige of the Mulroney-Bush advisory board was
instrumental in obtaining one of the biggest goldfields in East Africa at
Bulyanhulu, Tanzania. Barrick, according to its president, had hungered for
that concessionholding an estimated $3 billion in bullionsince the mid-1990s,
when it first developed its contacts with managers at Sutton Resources,
another Canadian company, which held digging rights from the government. (See
footnote 1.) Enriched by the Nevada venture, Barrick could, and eventually
would, buy up Sutton. But in 1996, there was a problem with any takeover of
Sutton: Tens of thousands of small-time prospectors, jewelry miners, so
called because of their minuscule finds, already lived and worked on the
land. These poor African diggers held legal claim stakes to their tiny mine
shafts on the property. If they stayed, the concession was worthless.
In August 1996, Suttons bulldozers, backed by military police firing weapons,
rolled across the goldfield, smashing down worker housing, crushing their
mining equipment and filling in their pits. Several thousand miners and their
families were chased off the property. But not all of them. About fifty
miners were still in their mine shafts, buried alive.
'Poppy strikes gold' - Greg Palast
barricks use of cyanide in mining process
Simon Mann footsoldier for Big interests
'Executive outcomes'
using ex MI6/ SAS / South African secret police as paramilitary mercenaries
Hackyult [Mi6 front company] involved
----------------------------------------
The US knew, Spain knew, Britain knew. Whose coup was it? The gossip and
rumour within British and American intelligence circles points towards the UK
and US certainly knowing that the coup was in the offing even if there was no
direct participation. However, some intelligence figures in African countries
have claimed that agents of MI6 and the CIA had been telling senior figures
in Equatorial Guineas military and intelligence services that if a coup did
take place that they should sit tight, hold still and not defend Obiang. It
is claimed that Britain and America intelligence agents told the military and
intelligence chiefs of Equatorial Guinea that in return for their inaction
they would be well looked after by any post-coup government.
Britain, it appears, had foreknowledge. A South African intelligence report
detailing suspicions about a coup attempt in Equatorial Guinea is known to
have been seen by British intelligence quite some time before the coup plot
was rumbled. The report also links members of the Equatorial Guinea plot with
the bloodless coup that took place in Sao Tome and Principe in July 2003. It
was from Sao Tome and Principe that some of the mercenaries are thought to
have travelled to Equatorial Guinea. -
----------------------------------------
foreign policy driven by Global elites....
----------------------------------------
----------------------------------------
Guinea coup & Sudan Oil linked...
-------------------------------------
Friedhelm Eronat's Sudan venture was very much a Chelsea-set affair.
The whole deal brokered by his close neighbour, Lebanese businessman, Eli
Calil. If his name sounds familiar it's because he is alleged to have helped
bankroll last year's failed coup in the West African state of Equatorial
Guinea, an allegation he denies.
Mr Felter said: "He was purely and simple an introducing instrument. It was
quite natural to ask Eli Calil he said he said I think I know a company that
might be interested because they are already in Chad and he therefore
introduced the Sudanese lot as it were to Eronat."
One of Darfur's rebel groups, the Justice and Equality Movement is adamant
that the search for oil will enflame the conflict. They want all exploration
to stop, until there is peace. Ahmad Hussein Adam of the JEM said: "So when
they say they discover oil in Darfur, who is going to benefit from that? Are
they the people of Darfur? Of course not. Absolutely not, the only
beneficiaries is the ruling elite and ruling minority of the regime."
In the rebels' view, Cliveden Sudan has joined those accused of propping up a
pariah regime, whose members include UN war crimes suspects. Yet, under
British law, Friedhelm Eronat has done nothing illegal in doing a deal with
Khartoum. But then there is the ethical argument. - Channel 4 investigation
---------------------------------------------------------------
hey! thanks Al Queda!!!!!!
good timing for terrorists.......
---------------------------------------------------------------
fourth of July - no terrorist attack
G8 meeting starts 6/7/2005 - no attack then either...
heres a picture i made bastardising the G8 logo
in January this year...
[freaked me out!]
London celebrates the olympic bid win
thousands gather in central london - No terrorist attack
still its all a conspiracy theory innit
so back to sleep UK
zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
paul c